“IT WAS A TERRIBLE THING TO SEE”
DOWNTOWN DAYTON – Part Three
JENNIE PARSONS
Jack and Jennie Parsons were living with their two children in a boarding house on South Jefferson Street during the time of the flood.
The whistles kept blowing and blowing. We couldn’t understand it. At last I got up and went to the front window. It was a little after six o’clock, still kind of gray.
“Oh, Jack,’ I said, ‘come here. Am I crazy or what?”
The whole street was full of running water – nasty yellow water. And men were walking around in it, almost up to the tops of their high rubber boots.
All the week before, it had rained, sometimes in regular cloudbursts. And South Jefferson, where we had taken rooms while we were in Dayton, was on very low ground.
“I’m going down to the contract,” said Jack, “to see that everything is all right.”
So Jack went off, in rubber boots, keeping close to the fences. And I was left alone with the two children.
I noticed that the water kept rising. And finally Mrs. Rawlins, the woman next door above us, called out to me.
“They say the reservoir at Shiloh’s gone.”
“I don’t see how such stories get started,” I said, “do you?”
“No,” she said. “But if I were you I’d send up and get some bread, anyway.”
There were half a dozen milk and bread carts lined up where South Jefferson Street rose to cross the railroad tracks. So I sent Marion up to get some bread. The lawns were higher than the streets, and she got there by way of the lawns, climbing over the fences. She came back with two loaves of bread, the last the man had.
Then Mr. Shoyer and his wife, - “Mother Shoyer” we called her, - the people we rented rooms from, came wading back. They had shut up their store, and on the way home had stopped at the meat market and bought a ham and two dozen eggs.
“Let’s rip up the rugs,” said Mother Shoyer, “and take what we can upstairs.”
We saved what we could in the next few minutes, and then suddenly we stopped.
At half past eight there was a big yelling up the street, and – crack! I looked up. On the edge of the canal, about a hundred yards away, was a kind of high old shed, like a bandstand; they used to keep the canal mules there in the old days. I saw that go crumpling down, and the water come rolling by – in waves, high waves, like rough weather on the ocean. And everybody was yelling: “The levee is gone!”
The water came down our street in a regular river. And everywhere it was full of whirlpools. It took those big horses and wagons from the track, and whirled them round and round; and, quicker than I can tell you about it, they were gone by.
But I was thinking of Jack.
“He can’t get here now,” said Mother Shoyer; “that’s sure.”
But I looked up the street; and there was Jack coming, hanging on to the top of the fences.
“Cheer up, Kid!” he called, waving his hand. “I’ll be there.”
So he finally reached us, though I thought he never would. And then we carried some more stuff upstairs.
Mother Shoyer had a new pianola, that had cost her nine hundred and fifty dollars, and she began to cry about it. So the men lifted it up and set it on two tables. (There was Jack, and Mr. Shoyer, and Earl Shoyer and “Frostie” – two boys about eighteen years old – and Mr. Collopy, a roomer.
“There, that will be high enough,” they said.
Then I remembered I had some eggs and bread and coffee in the kitchen, and went back after them. There was a big trap door in the middle of the kitchen floor, that opened down into the cellar; and just as I stepped into the kitchen – bang! The bolt flew up against the wall, and water came right up in a solid mass, and struck the ceiling. I ran as fast as I could, but the water was up to my knees before I got to the stairway. So we had to stay with the Shoyers upstairs.
The water went by down the street, carrying all kinds of stuff. It had risen into the business district above us by now, and things began to come down out of the store windows. First there were all kinds of tinware and pots and kettles from the Banner Store; they came down, spinning and spinning around in circles in the little whirlpools. Then the Harvard Clothing Store window went, and the dummies came floating by – wax figures in men’s suits, fine wax figures with hair, and some of them with mustaches. They looked weird – just like people. And then the grocery stores went, and boxes and barrels of food came by. So Jack and Mr. Shoyer went to the front door and began fishing for stuff with a clothes-pole. Most of it got away from them, but they got a splendid barrel of apples, and Jack was calling upstairs about it, when Mr. Shoyer said: “Say, Jack, look there – that’s a man.”
It was right in front of the house below.
“Man nothing,” said Jack. “It’s one of those dummies.”
And just then a man’s arm came up, over hand, in one of those new swimming strokes, and his head came out of the water – a young fellow, with his face perfectly white and his eyes bulging out from his cheeks. Then he went under twice.
“My God!” said Jack. “It is a man. I’m going out after him.”
But I screamed and Mr. Shoyer grabbed him and held him back. And Mr. Shoyer said:
“Hold on, Jack, they’re going to get him next door.” And they did.
They got him into their parlor, and he stood there with the water up to his waist. And then the people next door began saying to him:
“I don’t see how we can keep you here, we’ve got such a lot of people in the house now,”
“Excuse me!” said the fellow. “I’m not asking you for shelter; all I ask you is to let me rest till I get my strength, and then I’ll go on.”
So after a while he took off his coat and stepped out on the windowsill and looked at the water. Then he shivered, and said “Oh, I can’t go into that again!”
The water was just like ice water.
“You come over here, Mr. Man,” said Jack.
So he reached out his hand (the houses were close together there) and Mr. Collopy grabbed Jack’s hand, and Jack waded out and grabbed the man’s, and they pulled him across. And just as soon as he got into the hall, he fell unconscious.
We out a little whiskey through his teeth, and by and by he came to. His first words were:
“I can’t get to her now!” And then he saw us around him and said, “All I ask you to do is wrap me up in something and let me lie down and rest.”
He was shivering all over.
So we wrapped him up in all the blankets we had, and he lay down on the floor in the front room, and went right to sleep. And we went on looking out the window.
Just then the big planks began to come. They hit the house with an awful thump, going like a millrace. There was a big, heavy lamppost in front of the house, and I saw one of those planks come down against it, and in a second that big iron post doubled over like a wet weed.
Then furniture came down from the furniture stores, and pianos – the pianos bobbing along, all of them leaning a little bit forward. They came from the Aeolian Store, mostly. A friend of mine saw them start. The big plate-glass window broke, she said, and they came out, one by one, as if they were going out on parade.
And after that came horses from the livery stables. They came down one after another, and the water took them and whirled them round and round like chips.
Poor fellows! They didn’t understand it at all. They whinnied and made a queer noise, a sort of half cry and half snort – an awful sound that went right through you. And their lips were all curled away up over their noses, with all their teeth showing.
“They are all in when they do that,” said Mr. Collopy.
But the funniest thing was the rats. They came sailing down on soap-boxes and things – sitting up just like squirrels, looking around for a place to jump off.
“I don’t care if they are rats, Jack,” I said, “I wish they could be saved.”
But then there was something else – awful. Half a block away, where the water turned in by the railroad track, all of a sudden a man came along with the current, swimming, and holding up a little baby. And just as he was turning the corner into our street, his foot caught in a wire or something, and he went down. The current dragged him under.
He struggled a while, and when he got loose again the baby was gone. The man swam around and around two or three times, and looked. And then he shook his head and swam toward the houses, and they got him at a boarding-house at the corner. But the baby never came up.
It seemed to me I never knew a week so long as that morning. The men all went out on the south side of the house where an eddy had formed, and fished for stuff. There was everything you could think of there – even a live horse for awhile.
They fished out a big bag of potatoes, and a box of outing-flannel shirts, and a dummy from the clothing store; but most of the stuff was furniture – they got half a dozen fine tables.
All of them got soaking wet climbing around on the boards and things, and Jack didn’t have any change of clothes.
“What do you want me to do?’ he said. “Sit and watch that thing go by? I’d go crazy!” It was worse with Mr. Shoyer. His store was just up the street, and he knew he was losing everything he owned.
The weather was getting colder, and there was no way to make a fire upstairs. And pretty soon my wet skirts began to freeze. There wasn’t any drinking water, either; it stopped running about ten o’clock, and you couldn’t think of drinking that flood water.
Finally it came noon, and everybody was terribly hungry.
“I’ve got a box of sardines left over from Sunday night,” said Mother Shoyer. So we ate those, and a little bread. I took one sardine myself. I knew we’d have to be saving. The rest of them filled up from that barrel of apples. But I wouldn’t eat them; they’d been in that filthy water.
Pretty soon the man who’d been saved woke. He was sweating terribly, but he was better.
“All we’ve got to offer you,” said Mother Shoyer, “is two sardines and a piece of bread.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said the man. He was a very pleasant fellow.
So then he told us about himself. He had been married only three months; and when the flood came he was up at the shoe store where he worked, and his wife was alone in their house. So he started to swim home to her. It was a quarter of a mile.
He said he could have done it all right; only the water was so cold it took all the strength out of him; and when he struck that cross-current in the canal below our house, he had to give up and come back. But he was terribly worried about his wife.
“It’s funny, but I don’t remember that man’s name at all. He told it to us too, but I suppose we were too excited to remember. And whenever Jack spoke of him he called him “the guy that lost his wife;” so that’s the way I remember him.
About four o’clock it began to rain again – to pour. And every time one of those big drops hit the water it made a bubble as big as an egg.
We had water to drink after that. We set basins and caught the rain-drops. But then suddenly it began to get dark. It had been awful enough before that, but we had taken it good-naturedly and laughed and joked. But now we all began to feel kind of creepy.
We hadn’t any food to speak of – cooked food, I mean; and we hadn’t any fire, and we hadn’t any running water, and it was growing colder and colder, and we hadn’t any light in the house, not even a candle – only matches. And all the time the flood was rising and rising. The people next door told Mr. Collopy they heard another dam was gone. “Maybe we’re got to go down; but, if we do, we’ll go together,” said Mother Shoyer.
She made us move three beds into the big front bedroom, and we all got ready to spend the night there. Of course, no one intended to sleep; we were all too nervous.
There were ten of us who spent the night in that room. I got Jack and the two children over in one corner, where we could all take hold of one another and go down together, if we had to go. And the men sat along the front windows, looking out. Most of us were in rockers.
The first thing to do was to see how fast the water was rising. So Jack hitched a buttonhook on one end of a string, and all night he pulled it up every ten minutes. The water was rising fearfully fast.
So we ten people sat there in the dark, rocking and staring out. It was funny how differently it struck different people. Mr. Shoyer was thinking of his business. He had a lot of jewelry in the store.
“I wonder if any of the show-cases are left now,” he’d say. Or, “Do you suppose the safe will go too?”
“Of course it won’t,” Mother Shoyer would say. “It can’t”
Mother Shoyer got religious. She never had been very religious before. She played cards, and things like that.
“It’s a judgment on this house,” she’d say. “If we ever get through this, believe me, there’ll never be another card in this house. Yes, and we’ll go to church on Sundays, too!”
She prayed a great deal. “I’ve got to,” she said; “none of the men will.”
The water was rising inch by inch. Once it rose an inch and a half in ten minutes, according to our string.
The man that lost his wife would get up every now and then, and walk back and forth in the dark, and say:
“I wonder where she is now – I wonder where she is!”
But Jack and Mr. Collopy sat by the window and smoked; and finally they began to tell comical stories.
“If you clowns don’t shut up,” said Mother Shoyer, “I’ll come over there and kill you both!”
“Look here, Mother,” said Jack. “If we’ve got to die, let’s die cheerful, anyhow. They all were singing when the Titanic went down. Come on, Collopy, let’s sing something.”
But we were all getting pretty nervous.
It was terribly still; not a sound anywhere, except when somebody’d call out. And then the worst thing began to come – the houses going. It would be perfectly still; and all at once there would be a cracking, then a ripping and tearing noise; and then it would ease off as if the house had slid off its foundations. All the time there were those awful voices crying:
“Oh, God, God! Help us! Can’t somebody help us?”
